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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Mahler on the Couch (September 21st and 23rd at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[MAHLER ON THE COUCH screens Friday September 21st at 7:30 pm and Sunday September 23rd at 4 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

Remember Tom Lehrer? He was the Harvard math professor
who had a brief, brilliant career as a piano-playing musical satirist, quite
edgy for his time, pressing a few immortal albums before retiring from the gag
biz. He gave a fine excuse, that when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace
Prize, no joke Lehrer or anyone else could conceive could surpass what was
going on in reality. Kind of like what I felt about the 2000 elections. Anyway,
one of the tunes in the Tom Lehrer songbook was "Alma,"
a naughty little ditty about the wife of the great composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911); she
seemed to have serial marriages/affairs with geniuses, one after the other, in
different fields. If Alma lived in Hollywood
today...bet she'd be celibate (rimshot).

Most prominently Alma
ensnared (according to Lehrer; I won't even Wikipedia this) not just Mahler but
also the architect Walter Gropius (you can thank his revered Bauhaus school in
part for some of the really ugly office buildings around Cleveland),
and the award-winning author Franz Werfel. I have the Lehrer lyrics memorized:
"Alma, tell us/All modern
women are jealous/You didn't even use Pons/Yet you got Gustav and Walter and
Franz." Yet my four-digit PIN number remains a mystery to me. Why, why?

I wonder if esteemed German filmmmaker Percy Adlon and/or
his son Felix had Tom Lehrer's tune in mind when they tag-teamed together to
make MAHLER ON THE COUCH, a clever confabulation of a scrap of unusual facts
from the golden age of pre-World War One Vienna - that a frazzled Gustav Mahler
(Johannes Silberschneider) evidently sought out the legendary Sigmund Freud
(Karl Markovics) for an unscheduled consult on his marital woes with wayward
Alma (Barbara Romaner) - prefiguring generations of showbiz megastars who seem
to spend more time in therapy than rehearsal.

Those expecting Freud-bashing (which seems to be a la
mode in psychiatric circles; they were all kooks if you asked me) may be
disappointed, as Sigmund is a benignly comical figure - he admits to Mahler
that he's had a certain phobia about music, particularly Mozart's "Don
Giovanni" - who is more a narrative gateway to flashbacks about the power
couples' relationship. The much-older Gustav is music teacher to 22-year-old
Alma Schindler, considered the prettiest girl in Vienna and ardently pursued
by many. Alma also aspires to write music, a goal she must abandon when she
falls in love with established genius Mahler, who wants only one composer in
the household.

The relationship is tainted by Alma's
in-laws dislike for her - then family tragedy, then Alma's
ill-concealed affair with Walter Gropius, a genius closer to her own age. The
strain even threatens Mahler's health via a chronic heart ailment (part of the
composer's lifelong obsession with mortality). Though initially we get a
picture, mainly via Mahler's POV, of Alma
as Tom Lehrer would have rendered her, a crass floozy-groupie-gold-digger of
insatiable sexual appetites, some counseling by Freud gives a more balanced
picture, with Alma's side of
things.

Luckily, little of this is rendered in heavy Teutonic
tragedy. The Adlons' fast-paced style actually rather recalls a sort of a
highbrow Woody Allen (and Woody Allen can be pretty highbrow to begin with),
not unlike MIDNIGHT IN PARIS,
with various drawn-from-life characters (Mahler's sister Justine, Viennese
journalist Franz Hirn, the painter Klimt) speaking directly to the camera in
"interview" format. And it's a strong plus that just about everyone
looks era-correct. American cinema would have cast Ryan Reynolds as Mahler,
Channing Tatum as Freud, and some Victoria's
Secret shiksa as Alma (and Heidi
Klum's at liberty, too). But actress Barbara Rominar manages to be vivaciously
desirable and still look properly like she stepped out of a stiff, frau-ishly non-boudior
B&W photo-portrait from fin-de-siecle Vienna.

The Adlons also use Mahler's music as a constant
accompaniment, sometimes seemingly editing and writing dialogue to it - kind of
like Carl Stalling's melodies in the Looney Toons. Sometimes that works,
sometimes it doesn't. But this is in general an "art" film that is
really fun, not an easy thing to find, especially at the Cinematheque nowadays.

One Amazing Mahler Fun Fact the narrative ignores (and
the Adlons have come out and said it would have been a distraction here) is the
composer's famous spurning of his Jewish heritage, converting to Catholicism
primarily for career purposes. For more on that, I urge viewers to look into
the late Ken Russell's fever-dream biopic MAHLER, starring Robert Powell, which
I don't think a lot of classical music scholars recommend but which I found an
eyeful and earful. A home-video double-bill of MAHLER and MAHLER ON THE COUCH would
be a great chance to experience multiple Mahlergasms. Okay, maybe I just wanted
to invent the word "Mahlergasm." Alma
slept with guys for less. (3 1/4 out of 4 stars)